Shootout: Gigabyte ga-z77x-ud5h VS Asus P8Z77-V Pro

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pwrusr

2[H]4U
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Ok, since I have both boards in my possession I thought I might do a comparison between them for [H]. This will be my first review of this kind so please bare with me here.

I've just bought the Gigabyte to replace the Asus, not because the Asus has been a bad board. The p8z77-v pro has been rock solid for the week I've been running it. The Gigabyte simply offers a few built in features that I found more useful to me. Namely the better onboard sound, extra lan port and a couple other odds and ends.

So my question to [H] is what benchmarks do you want me to run with each board?

I can do bechmarks one of three ways...
run benchmarks once
run benchmarks 3-5 times and get a avrage (I personally like this way better)
run benchmarks 3-5 times and put each score up (although I can put the low and high score up as well if I run benchmarks more then 5 times).

I will be installing windows 7 Pro 64 Bit freash to my samsung 256GB 830 SSD before benchmarking the boards.

**EDIT**
Sorry guys this fell through, a friend made a offer on the i7 and I've already sent the unopened gigabyte back to newegg. This is probably for the better. I'll likely be going for a LGA2011 build in a short while...
 
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if its not too much trouble, maybe some pics showing a cpu cooler installed. I want to see how much room there is between the cooler and the first pciex1 and pciex16 slot
 
I wouldn't buy the ga-z77x-ud5h. It's very unstable, just read around. Asus also has horrible RMA's
 
Eradan said:
Well that takes two big players off the table. Who do you recommend and why?
Click to expand...

There are no good brands right now: ASRock has had inconsistent quality control with its boards, MSI also has reliability issues and Biostar seems to be not very interested in enthusiast-class boards. This leaves Intel - but even then, Intel (for the most part) favors reliability over performance.
 
Red Machine D said:
Run the benchmarks five times, showing each individual run, and then the average.
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Ok, but the big question remains, what benchmarks do you guys want me to run??:confused:
Just a heads up, I won't be able to start testing until this weekend.

Scotch77 said:
I wouldn't buy the ga-z77x-ud5h. It's very unstable, just read around. Asus also has horrible RMA's
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I've heard this as well. I think it might be a combination of teething pains with the new UEFI bios that gigabyte is using, a brand new z77 platform and needing to work the bugs out of the bios. Asus has up to this point been good to me. So I can't diss them since I personally never had any issues with any asus product I've owned (2 motherboards and a transformer tablet). That said, the RMA crap I've heard about Asus really made me go with another board.

Eradan said:
Well that takes two big players off the table. Who do you recommend and why?
Click to expand...
Seems that MSI is the one to get if you want the best support available along with a solid board. I considered picking up the Z77-GD65 as well but went with the gigabyte just because it had the dual lan and the msata on the mobo. I partally regret that decision because now my PS/2 keyboard will not work with the gigabyte. I have a spare USB keyboard, but I'll really miss this one. I may end up going with the MSI Z77-GD65 if these two boards don't pan out for me.
 
E4g1e said:
There are no good brands right now: ASRock has had inconsistent quality control with its boards, MSI also has reliability issues and Biostar seems to be not very interested in enthusiast-class boards. This leaves Intel - but even then, Intel (for the most part) favors reliability over performance.
Click to expand...

What kind of reliability issues are MSI users seeing?
 
Silver5656 said:
if its not too much trouble, maybe some pics showing a cpu cooler installed. I want to see how much room there is between the cooler and the first pciex1 and pciex16 slot
Click to expand...

I think this is ths shot you wanted:

IMG_8747.JPG


This is with a Cooler master Hyper 212+ and the fan that came with it. My future plans are to watercool, however for now this is a decent budget heatsink. :cool:
At full load temps don't go much past 70C

As you can see the Asus has juuuuuust enough room between the fan and ram slot one.
 
Scotch77 said:
I wouldn't buy the ga-z77x-ud5h. It's very unstable, just read around. Asus also has horrible RMA's
Click to expand...

I have been running UD5H for about 2 weeks now since Ivy was released along with i5 3570k in it and it has been rock solid stable on BIOS F6, no issues whatsoever, no lockups, freezes or anything.

I am extremely happy with this board I would say it is one of the best I have used in a really long time.
 
Aaaaand CRAP!!!
Didn't do enough research on the 2600k it seems (impulse buy came back to bite me). Can't do VT-D and asus lacks support for VT-D in the bios so even if I got a capable IB chip it still wouldn't work... Looks like the Gigabyte may support it however with a ivy bridge cpu.

This feature might not matter to most people, but my plan is to build a rig to do virtualization on top of gaming and such. I'm also a avid photobug and edit lots of pix. There were times when I was editing a big project and was using upwords of 7-8GB of memory between the photo program, browser windows and such.

I get a nagging feeling that I might be better off with a z79 system and one of these...

FRAK!!! I HATE YOU buyers remorse! :mad:
 
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Scotch77 said:
I wouldn't buy the ga-z77x-ud5h. It's very unstable, just read around. Asus also has horrible RMA's
Click to expand...
I've had a great experience with my UD5H ... besides a strange, oddly blank post screen that I can't seem to figure out ... but it's otherwise stable and and awesome. To be fair, I've heard the early BIOS versions were a bit hit and miss, but they've been cranking out updates pretty steady. F7 dropped just a few hours ago. I'm flashed and running strong.
 
Deeky, are you running a IB or SB CPU?
From different people I've heard the USB3 drivers for the extra controller on-board might be part of the cause of the freezing/rebooting some people are having.
 
pwrusr said:
Deeky, are you running a IB or SB CPU?
From different people I've heard the USB3 drivers for the extra controller on-board might be part of the cause of the freezing/rebooting some people are having.
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SB at the moment, 2500k.

I've had a few issues with my USB 3.0 Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex drive. Win 7 keeps telling me "it could be faster" but I had the exact same message pop up on my old Asus P6X58D Premium, so I suspect it's an issue with the drive moreso than the mobo.

I have yet to experience any odd lockups, crashes or sudden reboots.
 
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That seems to be exactly what I've read so far regarding the SB CPUs and the UD5H. For the most part they are SOLID in that combo, though there are a few that have reported issues. I'd venture to guess they are doing something wrong or more likely have a bad board and need to RMA :p
 
pwrusr,

I honestly don't know if bothering with benches would a good use of your time. I've looked at every Z77 roundup I can find online in the last week or so and it's evident that most of these boards perform similarly.

Since I'm not bound by brand loyalty, my evaluation has come to down to stability reports, ease of overclocking, fan header locations, onboard audio, LAN, and manufacturer customer service.

At this point, I'm leaning heavily towards the UD5H. Microcenter is listing the board for $140 when purchased with an i5-3570. Seems like a good deal to me.

E
 
pwrusr said:
Deeky, are you running a IB or SB CPU?
From different people I've heard the USB3 drivers for the extra controller on-board might be part of the cause of the freezing/rebooting some people are having.
Click to expand...



That might be, I think I installed all the drivers that came with the CD except for the Lucid MVP stuff, did not even bother with it.

I don't have any USB 3.0 device though to test. The only USB devices I am using is my standard mouse/keyboard.
 
Eradan said:
pwrusr,

I honestly don't know if bothering with benches would a good use of your time. I've looked at every Z77 roundup I can find online in the last week or so and it's evident that most of these boards perform similarly.

Since I'm not bound by brand loyalty, my evaluation has come to down to stability reports, ease of overclocking, fan header locations, onboard audio, LAN, and manufacturer customer service.

At this point, I'm leaning heavily towards the UD5H. Microcenter is listing the board for $140 when purchased with an i5-3570. Seems like a good deal to me.

E
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You have a good point Eradan. They do indeed all perform very close to one another. I thought I might help out [H]ardforum with a little shootout between the boards. I guess in the end benchmarks don't REALLY matter since they will be so close to one another.
If you guys would like I'll still take some pics.

davet said:
That might be, I think I installed all the drivers that came with the CD except for the Lucid MVP stuff, did not even bother with it.

I don't have any USB 3.0 device though to test. The only USB devices I am using is my standard mouse/keyboard.
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I'm not sure if those users had any usb3 devices or not. Also heard that setting the bclk down to 100.01 (or was it .10) helps with freezing.

Just passing along what I've heard/read in the tweaktown thread:
http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/48463-gz-z77x-ud5h-random-freezing-shutdowns.html
 
I own the Z77X-UD5H and tried to pair it with an IB and had all the lockup nightmare's you've read about. I don't buy the USB driver theory, I've had this board lock up in bios and during memtest86. It's pretty evident that it's a BIOS issue at this point and I *really* wish Gigabyte would get a handle on it, because it is a very nice MB.

Replaced it with an ASUS P8Z77-V PRO, not a single problem and I'm running a pair of Corsair Force 3 SSD's in raid 0 for my boot drive. (Gawd love that 1GB/sec read/writes).

Normally I've used EVGA boards, but they've been late to the table with the z77 boards, which makes me wonder if they've been dealing with IB issues as well.
 
Hmm. Just lucky I stuck with SB, I suppose.

For those who are sticking it out, I wonder if F7 helped at all?
 
Deeky said:
Hmm. Just lucky I stuck with SB, I suppose.

For those who are sticking it out, I wonder if F7 helped at all?
Click to expand...
I did install the May 11 official F7 BIOS update, then tried changing the Base Clock back to the default (away from 100.1), and sure enough, same lock-ups. Agreed, Gigabyte is arrogant and lazy on this one. They know about the problem and haven't done a damn thing.
 
Eradan said:
Well that takes two big players off the table. Who do you recommend and why?
Click to expand...

Checkout the MSI Z77 GD65. [H] just did a review of the board and gave it a gold award.

Also, i am looking forward to the opinions by the op
 
I sent the Gigabyte back since I couldn't get newegg to budge on the restocking fee on the asus.
since I never opened the gigabyte... so no restocking fee on it.

Sorry I couldn't do much of a review on the gigabyte guys, I'm just the average joe and I don't want to pay almost $40 for a restocking fee :(

I still like the Asus though. The faults are few and for the most part forgivable. It's a very stable board once I figured out that the ram was the cause of the slight instability (one of the sticks was bad). Heck even before I discovered that one of the sticks was bad I thought it was a pretty solid rig.
 
Friend bought the 2600k tonight...
Back to the drawing board (and laptop) I go. Hopefully I can "trade" boards with an RMA dance and skip the restocking fees at the egg...

...one can only hope.

Again I apologize for not coming through with promised benchmarks/comparisons. Things just did not work out for me with this build at all :(
 
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